July 2008

July 31 2008

This is great marketing -- and apparently, quite successful:Since the beginning of 2008, we have been sending a little calculator to companies in Belgium that don't use IBM Lotus infrastructure. We want to calculate with them how much money they can save by migrating to IBM Lotus. After having con...

July 31 2008

This morning, IBM is releasing specific details on the success for Lotus products during the first half of 2008. I have been here a long time; this press release is different in a number of ways from any we've done in the past.Led by strong sales of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 in the second quarte...

July 30 2008

At the recent Microsoft partner conference (earlier this month in Houston), the Exchange team highlighted the "momentum" around Exchange 2007. We must have different definitions of "momentum", though. In highlighting this supposed "momentum", Microsoft's presentation claimed that "Notes/Domino win...

July 29 2008

The services team at Lotus has a new podcast out on how to best implement Notes and Domino 8. Featuring Joseph Anderson and Brad Schauf, the podcast looks at the planning process, suggested tools, and avoiding mistakes. Download the podcast -- or read the transcript -- on the new IBM ISSL ExpertBr...

July 28 2008

It appears that Avanade has decided to try to counter some comments from my blog entry last week about their parent company, Accenture. The bio-less "KevinB", whose blog does not allow comments, writes:Accenture is, and remains in my opinion, one of the best examples of a well executed, enterprise...

July 28 2008

It looks like I'll be holding a team meeting for my little part of the IBM Lotus sales next week in Cambridge. We talked amongst ourselves and thought of a novel idea for part of our agenda....invite a few customers to join us for lunch. We're meeting in Cambridge... any Boston-area customers inte...

July 28 2008

As a reminder, this household owns an iMac, iPod, and iPhone 3G...I'm a fan of Apple. But in my day job role as an ISV, as much as I want them to be successful, I want them to be successful:[S]ome, like Crunchgear writer John Biggs, have called Apple's success a curse. As Apple has grown to...

July 28 2008

Last November, I wrote about how aggressive Google was being at doing street-level views on Google Maps. It was cool to see my neighborhood, and much of the entire area, mapped out at street level. Eight months, later, it's all gone. The street-level views of this particular subdivision have all...

July 27 2008

Spend five days in a country, any country, and you barely start to get a taste for what it is like. Visit its two largest cities, and that sense is very distorted, especially for a country as large and diverse as Brazil. As a motorbike driver deliberately smacked the rearview mirror of my colle...

July 25 2008

One of the most interesting, but slightly uncomfortable, parts of presenting at the Lotus Top Gun training class in São Paulo this week was leading a competitive discussion with a very recently ex-Microsoft sales guy in the room. While everything I present in that section is based on publicly-avail...

July 23 2008

Today's list is travel-related only... I will have some more business observations after my time in the Lotus Top Gun training class today and in the customer meetings in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow... 1. Down the street from this hotel is an apartment/condominium building with an amenity that...

July 22 2008

I haven't blogged about the OOXML saga for several months. For one, the politics leading to the ISO vote were wearing thin on me. For another, once Microsoft announced ODF support, I felt like the issue of OOXML's future was far less interesting. But as Nathan Freeman pointed out to me yesterday,...

July 22 2008

Take your IBM ID to the IBM Lotus Symphony Productivity Editors Survey.... ten minutes of your time to tell us what you think of Symphony so far would be super-helpful. Many of the questions are open-ended, so be prepared to answer specifically what you like and don't like about the current shippin...

July 22 2008

Bruce reports on the initial impact of 12 pilot users using Apple iPhone 2.0 and Exchange ActiveSync in his work environment:With only a dozen pilot users testing out iPhone 2.0 with Exchange we have put an emergency stoppage to our testing due to the fact that our T1 connecting our Exchange 2003 an...

July 21 2008

Fascinating first 36 hours in São Paulo. Some initial observations, business and non-business: 1. The Lotus brand sales team in Brazil includes two former Microsoft employees. One of these guys sold the Information Worker products for Microsoft, and joined IBM just a week ago. I sat with...

July 21 2008

July 19 2008

Just before heading out for O'Hare, I had the chance to upgrade to Notes 8.0.2 beta 2. Zoom! I am definitely impressed at the faster responsiveness of the Notes client (standard configuration). For example, my calendar is painting instantaneously when switching views...that was definitely not happ...

July 17 2008

So, over the last few weeks, a number of my colleagues who work on Lotus products for IBM have decided to move on to new opportunities. Some have been publicly visible, because of blogging, tweeting, or whatever. Some have been quiet and behind the scenes. Either way, I've been asked a lot about...

July 17 2008

This has to be a first... I'm linking to a business partner who has posted screenshots from IBM of not-yet-released beta code. Kudos for Paul for building trust with the iNotes team, and to the iNotes team for recognizing Paul's credibility in this space.IBM was good enough to come back to me with...

July 16 2008

After a pretty extensive discussion and review of support call volumes, we're looking at a decision to extend the end-of-support date for Notes/Domino 6.5 from the currently announced April, 2009, to April, 2010. Extended support would continue to be available after the end-of-support. The current...

July 16 2008

On Saturday, I'm leaving for São Paulo and Rio, Brasil. But this is a trip that almost wasn't, because getting a business visa for Brasil is a cumbersome and lengthy process. The lengthy part I knew -- the Chicago Brazilian consulate says that it takes them eight working days to process the visa r...

July 15 2008

Head-to-head review of Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, Zoho, and OpenOffice.org...with Lotus Symphony receiving the top score of 7.8:Lotus Symphony is the most polished of this particular pack of productivity suites. The word processor continues many of the complex formatting features that made Ami Pro...

July 15 2008

This paper has been out for a couple of months but only recently appears to have made it to ibm.com... A 16-page white paper on IT trends in collaboration and productivity. Doesn't mention Lotus products until page 15...meaning it is meant more to be used for creating vision than to hype a particul...

July 14 2008

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...Well, I just couldn't NOT test it. Now I own an iPhone, it was a matter of time before I gave it a go. So, using the public beta of the 8.5 server, which we run, I upgraded my mail file to the 8.5. This gives me access to the Notes Ultralite UI, which is designed to...

July 14 2008

Paul Robichaux, an Exchange MVP and long-time Machead, has published an assessment of the iPhone 2.0's user experience as an e-mail device. Paul and I have clashed from time to time over which side of the fight we're on, but one thing is for sure -- he knows his stuff on Exchange, and has the cred...

July 12 2008

Over the long weekend in the States last week, I passed a fair bit of time making physical images out of recent digital photographs. The effort made for an interesting experiment, as I tried working with three photobook services -- Flickr/QOOP.com, MyPublisher.com, and iPhoto itself on my (daughter...

July 11 2008

A customer considering whether to upgrade to Notes 8 or switch to an alternative recently challenged me that they would have to incur "significant training costs" in order to upgrade to Notes 8. They argued that the UI had changed so dramatically that they couldn't simply upgrade and go. Thus, the...

July 10 2008

A potential user base of "thousands" moving to Lotus Symphony...In an interview yesterday, George Lymbers, CIO of the organisation, said he has uncovered substantial savings potential by getting rid of licence fees. "Some people say, well you only need Windows. Wait a second: you need Office, you n...

July 10 2008

A few weeks ago, Microsoft employees started making various claims about a specific look at market share on the blogs and elsewhere. Volker Weber decided to challenge the claim, putting up a wiki as a in-public-view way of determining the accuracy of those MS claims. Very quickly, it became appare...

July 9 2008

Big news out today -- Alan Lepofsky has accepted a new role as Director of Marketing at Socialtext. This is a huge opportunity for Alan, from the perspective of applying the skills gained from a variety of product, channel, and strategy roles at IBM Lotus, and also in making the move to a big role...

July 8 2008

A colleague asked me the other day if I could define what it is about the Lotus community that is so unique. There are strong communities around many technology products... each with many of the same attributes of passion, dedication, awareness, evangelism. So what's different around here? I thin...

July 7 2008

The article is a bit understated considering the magnitude of this decision...and many others like it that took place despite significant Microsoft pressure during their just-completed fiscal Q4:CENTRELINK has rejected a move from its entrenched IBM Lotus Notes platform after spending the past coupl...

July 7 2008

A mainstream media piece on blogging and social media in business. A lot of point-of-view on what the benefits are and who is using social networking/media. Includes a bit about Lotus Connections:"Large corporates are using this to connect their own employee base together. Smaller companies are ge...

July 7 2008

Peter Abrahams of Bloor Research on his initial reactions to Lotus Symphony...Lotus Symphony is the office productivity suite embedded into Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is a product that is bought in large numbers by many enterprises. This means that Symphony has the full engineering excellence--reliabi...

July 6 2008

Nice coverage in the mainstream media, in this case, a New York newspaper...The interface may be good enough to pacify picky Mac users in mixed computing shops - I sure wouldn't try to foist Open Office on them. IBM has edited out some of the more obscure features of Open Office and left the importa...

July 6 2008

In two weeks, I will be visiting São Paulo, Brazil for the first time. I'm in town for five days, with the main draw for me being my ½ day speaking at Lotus "Top Gun" training. This is only my second business trip to South America, and the first to feature one-on-one customer meetings, so I'm quit...

July 3 2008

Just finished listening to the latest Taking Notes podcast, which interviews John Head and Rob McDonagh about the new XPages development features in Domino 8.5. John and Rob are both Notes/Domino design partners, so they share their insights from the recent workshops in Westford and the latest beta...

July 2 2008

My colleagues down under have announced a technical conference to be held in Sydney the week of 15 September.... On the 15th, they'll hold the annual "Lotus Collaboration Summit", which is a free product/strategy event similar to those which were done worldwide last year in the second half of th...

July 1 2008

The Journal comments on a new Forrester Research report:A new study by Forrester Research reviewed 90 blogs run by business-to-business companies in the Fortune 500, and surveyed about twice that many B2B marketers. Like most businesses, these companies want to use the Internet to reach their custom...

July 1 2008

AustralianIT attempts to take the hype factor down a notch towards reality...The iPhone, after all, has an extremely high lust-after factor, and people, from the average punter to big end of town executives, can't wait to sample it when it hits Australia on July 11. Two key stumbling blocks for iPh...